Print 2011: margins and opportunities

As much as we’d like to think we’re headed towards a paperless office (for the environment’s sake, if nothing else), printing will still be a significant part of normal office life in 2011. Documents at work, photos at home, guilty pleasure or absolute necessity, the explosion of content and data on the Web and elsewhere has meant printers will be as important to organisations and individuals as ever.

Within that context it is amusing that some customers are looking at being ‘green’ with their printers acquisitions by purchasing less energy. Vendors such as Dell are happy to oblige.

Dell software and peripherals brand manager, Ben Guthrie, said 2011 would be a year in which LED technology took off for this reason.

“We’ve recently launched a whole range of LED printers that are laser class, but by utilising LED technology it’s enabling us to have few moving parts, quite a reduced space and footprint in terms of the physical size of the unit itself, and more importantly the device itself is using less power," he said.

“I think for years now people have been speaking about the paperless office. If you actually look at the consumption rate of paper and those kinds of things it has only really skyrocketed even as the level of computerisation across the industry has become higher and higher.”

Eventually, we will get to a situation where the paperless office is a genuine possibility, Guthrie said, but not in the short, or even medium term.

“Not within my working lifespan, I would suggest,” he said. “The amount of value that businesses and people are putting in that information becomes higher and higher, and a hard copy is still a hard copy.”

So with printing firmly established as a part of life, the question becomes what are the various vendors in the industry looking at bringing to market over the next year? And, just as importantly, in a margin-starved industry on the hardware side, what are the vendors doing to encourage and develop their channels?

Hardware developments

Loss leading is an apt way to describe the hardware sell in the printing space. If you are a vendor that offers a margin on the hardware side to resellers, it’s hardly going to be sufficient.

It’s a fact of life that the money for the channel in printing lies with the consumables and services story.

But the good news is that there is plenty of new hardware coming through that can either open up new conversations with existing customers, or pull new customers away, perhaps, from competitors.

Konica Minolta is reckoning on a increase in colour and printing speeds on the lower end of the spectrum, and on the higher end the introduction of a inkjet printer that would be quality enough for the kinds of documents that we would receive in the mail as correspondence from various organisations, and this will cannibalise away part of the colour toner monopoly.

So between inkjets, LEDs and toner printers, there is going to be plenty of options for the customer – and leading opportunities for the partner that are backed with an increasingly varied range of services to provide the profit.

“We just need to be in a position where there is margin left in it for the resellers on the consumables that are bundled in with the equipment,” Konica Minolta national marketing manager, David Procter, said.

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